Lecture at Journalism & Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong

1. JOURNALISM,
DISINFORMATION AND
FACEBOOK: HOW TO
SURVIVE AN
EARTHQUAKE
GEORGE BROCK
VISITING PROFESSOR, CITY, UNIVERSITY OF
LONDON
JOURNALISM & MEDIA STUDIES CENTRE,
HONG KONG UNIVERSITY, MARCH 13 2019

2. LONG STORY SHORT
• Journalist, Yorkshire Evening Press (1973-6), The Observer
(1976-81), The Times (1981-2009).
• Professor and Head of Journalism, City, University of London
(2009-14). Professor (2014-17); Visiting Professor (2017- )
• Author: Thatcher (1983), Out of Print: the Business of News
in the Digital Age (2013), The Right To Be Forgotten: Privacy
and the Media (2016).
• Previously: board member, International Press Institute and
president and board member World Editors Forum
• Currently: board member, the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, London
• So…I’m talking mostly about the UK, the rest of Europe and
the English-speaking world

3. 3 PARTS TODAY
1.What is happening to
journalism?
2.Why that isn’t only about
journalism – and why that
matters
3.What you have to do next

4. DEMOCRACY AT AN
INFLECTION POINT
“Revenue models for online journalism are
emerging, but it will be many years before those
models can support the diversity which is crucial
to the public benefit which quality news and
opinion brings…Frictionless peer-to-peer
communication online and the social networks
built on it are producing a crisis in societies where
there is a shrinking consensus on how to establish
or recognize the truth. These deteriorations add up
to an emergency in civil society.”
(George Brock, to UK Cairncross Inquiry, 2018)

5. WE ALREADY KNOW…
• that journalism is struggling to find a
business model almost everywhere
• that digital disruption isn’t a one-off
event
• that it’s recurrent waves of change which
affect most areas of life
• that disinformation and misinformation
are multiplying
• This has important consequences
beyond journalism

6. RISE AND FALL
• What began as an engine of opportunity and thrilling
innovation – not to mention a whole lot of fun – turned out
to have a dark side
• Example: Pepe the Frog

7. VISIBLE
CONSEQUENCES NOW
1. Political disruption
• Trump, Bolsonaro (Brazil), Brexit, Beppe Grillo (Italy),
Duterte (Philippines), Podemos & Vox (Spain), AfD
(Germany), gilets jaunes (France)
• De-alignment from established parties in Europe
• Opportunities for covert electoral interference (many
governments learn from Russia)
2. “Techlash” – the social networks and platforms which rode a
wave of popularity are today the target of controversy, scrutiny
and - almost certainly – regulation
3. Global action needed to tackle the ‘downward plunge to a
dysfunctional future’ Tim Berners-Lee

8. BREXIT!
• At midnight on March 29, the UK is due to leave the
European Union after 46 years of membership
• In the 2016 referendum, the ‘Leave’ campaign beat the
‘Remain’ campaign by 52% to 48%
• How that is to happen still isn’t decided. The House of
Commons in London is trying to break the deadlock about
the details of the divorce right now

9. BREXIT: SIGNALS IN
THE NOISE
• Controversy, accusations and official
investigations about
• micro-targeting and/or data misuse by the
‘Leave’ campaign, which used Facebook
extensively
• Breaches of law on campaign spending?
• Increased concern about the effect of
social networks on democracy and
demands for social platform laws
• Current dark ads

10. SAMPLE AD

11. THE HOT BUTTON
ISSUE

12. WHERE WERE THE
FACTCHECKERS?
• Fewer in number than now (and less well organised)
• Drowned out: No one “forecast that speech itself would
become a weapon of censorship” Tim Wu
• Ignored
• Journalists and politicians used mainstream media to
point out these lies, fantasies and distortions, but to little
effect (eg Esther McVey)
• Information power had changed.
Mainstream media was bypassed.
• Lots of people hadn’t noticed

13. PRESSURES ON THE
BBC

14. BBC
• ‘You have no idea how much pressure we’re under’
• Most trusted UK news source, but numbers who think it’s
biased are rising
• Pro-Leave voices: all BBC staff are pro-Remain
• Pro-Remain voices: BBC output riddled with ‘false
equivalence’ (the blue banana dilemma)
• “The social media whirlpool makes it all happen
faster…amplifies the noise” Fran Unsworth, BBC Director of
News
• Social media makes a big political fracture angrier and
more personal

15. INFORMATION POWER
SHIFT
• The reporting of the news and its distribution
have been disconnected from each other
• News can be a do-it-yourself assembly
• Anyone with a smartphone can publish
• 40 zetabytes of data by next year
• = 3m books for each person on the planet
• Gatekeepers have gone (the Bezos irony)
• Algorithms that determine information flows are
opaque

16. EXTREMES GAIN
• They exploit speed: little time to check (see satellite TV
news in India)
• Argument – the more polarised the better - boosts ratings;
pundits are cheap
• Social platforms disconnect assertion/outrage from
evidence
• This is a power shift towards the extremes
• Combined cumulative effect of proliferation of TV
channels (satellite+cable), mobile internet and social
platforms
• Look at YouTube and the child vaccination health
emergency

17. YOUTUBE: ‘VACCINATION
FOR CHILDREN’

18. DOES THIS MATTER?
• Information power shifts are not new:
invention of printing, the Enlightenment
in Europe, start of broadcasting
• News was always filtered and edited by
an elite; now we hear more voices
• Journalism has always had to adapt to
changes in economics, society, law,
technology. What’s new?
• More people are connected and maybe
involved. What’s not to like?

19. IT DOES MATTER
• Representative democracy requires a
measure of agreement about how to
recognise truth
• That involves agreement about what
counts as facts and evidence (but it
doesn’t stop arguments about which ones
are more important or what they mean)
• Without that, elected power lacks
legitimacy and public deliberation is
distorted

20. EARTHQUAKE (1)
• The ease of transmitting information across the planet goes
with increased difficulty in ensuring information’s
authenticity – and increasing opportunities for creating ‘deep
fakes’
• It is easier than ever to blur, or to erase, certainty
• Novelist Salman Rushdie:
• Q: What is the biggest problem of all?
• A: Our collective inability to agree on the nature of reality. There
are such conflicting descriptions of how things are that it
becomes difficult to make agreements that allow people to move
forward.
• Tobacco industry executive 1969:
• ‘Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing
with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public.’

21. EARTHQUAKE (2)
• The gatekeepers are now ISPs,
search engines, platforms
• The credibility of journalism is
now a target for politicians who
fear facts
• ‘Fake news’ is now just a
soundbite slogan

22. THIS MAN SYMBOLISES
THE PROBLEM

23. ZUCKERBERG
• He managed to give testimony to the US
Congress without once discussing Facebook’s
information power
• That power is derived from reach: Facebook now
has 2.3bn users worldwide. Whatsapp: 1.5bn.
Instagram: 1bn
• Facebook ‘gives the illusion of the perfect vector for
direct democracy, where all ideas can have equal
reach, misinformation propagates faster then legit
news, and where anyone can be pilloried’. (Frederic
Filloux, 2018)

24. TUESDAY BREAKFAST
IN MENLO PARK
• Facebook does not generate content like a
traditional media company
• But it does edit. The network exercises power over
the ‘infrastructure of free speech’ (current example:
Elizabeth Warren ads)
• In many countries Facebook is the infrastructure of
free speech
• That power is private and – so far - unaccountable.
Facebook has opened some of its processes, but
there is little transparency for its decisions (eg on
content moderation) and few external restraints

25. ONE KEY POLICY
COMMON TO ALL
PLATFORMS
• Facebook (incl Whatsapp & Instagram), Google (incl
YouTube), Amazon, Reddit and others have been forced to:
• Hire more moderators
• Apologise more frequently
• Accept that they have ‘responsibilities’
• Use more outside advisers (eg Facebook content oversight
board)
• Generate more solutions to issues raised by harm
• But the one thing they all refuse to do is to allow independent
inspection of what they do and how they do it.
• Breaking down this refusal is going to be a major issue
worldwide over the next decade

26. SOCIAL NETWORKS
AND JOURNALISM
• The simple view: Facebook and Google have stolen the ad
revenue from mainstream journalism and flooded the
world with misinformation
• The diversion of ad revenue is a result of the economics of
digital communications and the web.
• Any application which enabled advertisers to target only
the people they want to reach would have succeeded.
• Publishers who invested heavily in platforms distribution
and then were left struggling when Facebook’s algorithm
changed have only themselves to blame
• These are serious issues but journalists should worry
more about ‘truth decay’ and its causes

27. THE ISSUE IS DEEPER
THAN NEWS MEDIA
ECONOMICS
• Facebook is driven by two things:
• It is the most desirable low cost way of presenting
yourself to the world ever invented
• It is the most powerful advertising engine ever built
• Neither of these drivers has much to do with truth
(Example: steam from the coffee cup)
• Facebook has acknowledged, slowly and reluctantly,
that it has ‘responsibilities’.
• But it has never acknowledged that it has any
responsibility for the quality of public deliberation or
public reason

28. CONNECTING PEOPLE
• Facebook’s most consistently declared aim is to ‘connect’
people
• Connection is not in itself a democratic or moral value.
Friends are connected. So are gangsters, conspirators
and terrorists.
• Sharing and recommending are likewise neutral things:
they can be good or bad, depending
• Information on social platforms has no hierarchy by value;
the hierarchy on search engines is opaque
• “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel prize-
winning physicist looks exactly the same on your
Facebook page as the denial of climate change by
somebody on the Koch brothers payroll…everything is
true and nothing is true” – Barack Obama

29. LES GILETS JAUNES
(‘YELLOW VESTS’)

30. MISUNDERSTANDING
DEMOCRACY
• Democracy is about how the power to
decide things is distributed fairly and
justly in a society
• That invariably involves a difficult – and
often disputed - balance of freedom and
controls in law
• Carried away by the intoxicating
spectacle of the internet as an engine of
opportunity, we have until recently
neglected the harms, risks and dangers

31. TYPES OF
DEMOCRACY
• Most of the English-speaking world (and a good deal of
the rest of the world) is governed by representative
democracies. We elect people to represent and deliberate,
but not to follow our orders
• Not direct democracy
• Mark Zuckerberg thinks that direct is better:
• “By giving people the power to share, we are starting to
see people make their voices heard on a different scale
from what has been historically possible. These voices will
increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored.
Over time, we expect governments will become more
responsive to issues and concerns raised by all their
people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a
select few.”

32. UNTRANSPARENT
RULE-MAKING
• Facebook doesn’t just make voices heard: its algorithms,
designed by humans, select, prioritise and control how the
voices are heard
• We don’t see this because of technical complexity,
commercial secrecy and – above all – Facebook sets its face
against all but the most limited access to what it does.
• Facebook’s executive dealing with outside experts, Peter
Stern:
• “I can’t think of any situation in which an outside group has
actually dealt with the writing of any policy. That’s our work”.
• So the power to arbitrate free speech issues has moved to
private platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Reddit
• Their policies lack philosophical, human rights and legal
underpinning, case law or precedent (Example: ‘right to be
forgotten’)

33. THIS IS THE DANGER
FOR DEMOCRACIES
• Often asserting free speech rights, social network users
are drowning out the material on which politics depends:
verifiable, authenticated reporting in the public interest
• At a meeting recently in the UK a journalist asked a
Facebook executive why it had taken so long to take down
material by Alex Jones. Jones runs the ‘alt-right’ Infowars:

34. MISINFORMATION IS
OK
• Facebook executive Andy Bell:
• “Just to be clear: misinformation in itself is not against our
community standards. He (Jones) was taken down for
specific hate speech issues.”
• The problem in a nutshell
• How do we balance toxicity and free expression?
• Finding the difference between legitimate political
influence and interference
• The wide tolerance for expression is leaving democracies
vulnerable
• “Open societies are profoundly endangered at present”
George Soros

35. BREXIT
• In the UK in 2016, the range of opinion available to voters
in the referendum was wider because of social media. New
voices were heard.
• But some of that extra width to the debate consisted of
lies, half-truths and exaggerations – material designed to
blur evidence
• Writing new rules, laws and procedures to prevent online
harms and to counteract misinformation is not simple
• But not impossible
• It cannot happen without politicians becoming interested
and engaged. Few are.
• Most are obsessed with the party politics of…Brexit

36. DISCONTENTS
• Misinformation is not the only democratic discontent
• Political elites are very unpopular as out of touch, ignorant
of the state of their countries and often corrupt
• This has created a revolt against liberal democracy which,
in many ways, is a rebellion against modernity

37. WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO
DO WITH JOURNALISM?
• “I believe that the biggest risk we face as
Americans is our own ability to discern
reality from nonsense. I wish there was a
solution as simple as banning all
propaganda, but it’s not that easy” –
Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit
• If there is one business journalism must
be in it’s the business of sorting reality
from nonsense.

38. REWIRING THE
PUBLIC SPHERE
• The cumulative effect of the unfinished changes
to how we acquire, store and distribute
information has been to reshape public debate
• The public sphere is automated; we can
influence what we see but we don’t control the
flow
• Journalism has become a much smaller part of
all the information in circulation, massively
increased in velocity and volume
• Is journalism just an idea and practice which
flourished for a limited historical period when
conditions allowed?

39. LOOK OUTSIDE
JOURNALISM
• It is not in journalism’s power to solve the pollution of
public information on its own
• My Twitter feed is full of people with suggestions for
remaking or reviving journalism
• They’re promoting ‘solutions journalism’,
empathy/emotion, transparency, greater trust, the end of
artificial constraints to be neutral or balanced, citizen
journalism and ‘constructive’ journalism.
• All these ideas are good
• But they miss the point: they are mostly about what
journalists think and do

40. IT TAKES TWO

41. REPAIRING
EARTHQUAKE DAMAGE
Dealing with the
power shifts: what
the new generation
of journalists needs
to do

42. 1. THINK ABOUT THE
DEMAND SIDE
• Journalists are – naturally - thinking about what
they produce and how they do that
• We also have to think about what people want
from something we call ‘news’.
• Avoidance of news is rising
• Mistrust of news is rising (a little may always be
healthy)
• The buzzwords ‘engagement’ and ‘conversation’
recognise the need for thinking hard about the
new context in which journalism works

43. 2. NO SINGLE
SOLUTION
• How you engage with or converse with your user
and community will depend on individual
circumstance
• (Same goes for the search for elusive business
models: there’s not going to be a miracle, one-
stop-shop answer – but a variety of stuff that
works)
• One common factor to news organisations that
are surviving: high-quality experiment
• (E.g. could AI produce a digital version a
reproduction of the experience of reading a
printed paper? How close could it get?)

44. 3. EDITORS ROCK
• Information, once scarce, is now in glut. The hard
problems turn on the management of abundance
• That means that selection, distilling and hard choices
have to be faced to produce material which people want to
consume
• This used to be known as ‘editing’. In the digital age, it’s
gone a bit out of fashion, since space is not rationed
online.
• But note: the mainstream media winners on the web are
well-edited. It’s a clue.
• Gatekeepers, aka editors, do useful stuff

45. 4. BUILD FOR
SERENDIPITY
• It’s possible that the panic about ‘filter bubbles’
is overdone (research suggests so)
• But journalists, with their experience of bundling
news into packages, ought to be good at giving
people alternative views and sense-making that
is challenging
• You can’t force people people to consume news
and opinions they don’t want to read
• But you can vary their diet in interesting and
attractive ways (Example: deepnews.ai)

46. 5. CORE TASKS
• Journalism can and should concentrate on less: can’t be first
rough draft of history any more. Get over it.
• Here are four things which reporters and editors can do
which are better done with training and experience.
Journalism stripped to its 21st century essentials:
• Verification (now a vast part of the effort of reporting
because of the volume of information in circulation)
• Sense-making (incorporating analysis, commentary, polemic)
• Investigation (exposing information which should be known
in the public interest, but which someone wants to hide)
• Eye-witness (even with video, this is significant surprisingly
often)

47. 6. GIZMOS: THINK
OUTCOMES FOR
HUMANS
• Take online reader comments
• Everybody got excited about how easy it is for readers to
comment on (and correct) journalism.
• What’s not to like about crowd-sourcing? More people =
more wisdom
• Turned out badly: wise people stayed away, stupid people
piled in
• The failure? The assumption that comments should be
policed the same for an article on knitting as for one on rape.
• Unleash your inner anthropologist: what works with real
people and why?
• “It’s not information overload; it’s filter failure” (Clay Shirky)

48. 7. JOURNALISM SHOULD
NOT OUTSOURCE FACT-
CHECKING
• By all means use specialists, but
verification/authentication is a core task
• Be careful:
• The most effective disinformation is not invented but subtly
distorted – explanation can be complicated
• Lecturing people can misfire
• Factcheck organisations now moving into newsrooms

49. 8. A TEST
• If an AI robot ran for political office in Hong
Kong, would your newsroom have the skills to
report it well?
• (There’s an HK hedge fund board one of whose
members is an algorithm – sort of)
• So gather, generate, acquire technical skills (eg
WSJ and deep fakes training)
• Upskill in general (individuals and newsrooms):
more diversity but also more diverse skills, more
data and techniques to handle it, more numeracy
more widely spread

50. 9. STOP WORRYING
ABOUT ‘ELITISM’
• When the tide of opinion runs strongly (as now) against
elites, journalists want to show that they are outside the
elite.
• Some of that detachment if surely necessary to report well
on the powerful
• But beware
• Not all expertise and opinions are equal; some are more
valuable than others. Your job is make public debate
better.
• Journalism informs: ‘I know this and you should know it
too’
• That is an inherently unequal relationship

51. 10. VALUE
• Much of the news is ‘waste’ – duplication of effort and
produced out of habit more than to meet real need
• Successful newsrooms focus relentlessly and ruthlessly
on what they can deliver that no one else can
• Judgements about true value are the key to survival
• Once something becomes a commodity, it’s likely to be
free
• Anything which costs you to produce but bring no income
has to be suspect
• Skateboarding cats and Buzzfeed

52. 11. TRANSPARENCY
• The single best change to the political-legal situation of
the platforms would be an enforceable right for regulators
to see the algorithmic workings, the ads, the targeting
• There are good reasons – fear of being gamed, protection
of commercial secret sauce – why a lot of this can’t be
public
• But edited versions of what the regulators find will raise
levels of awareness
• This is easy to describe but hard to do: platforms operate
across many borders and many governments and
regulators lack the resources or skills to cope

53. 12. ARGUE FOR LAW
• We will look back on the first phase of social media and
wonder at how governments allowed the platforms to
operate with such freedom
• Law has not caught up. E.g. US Communications Decency
Act (section 230)
• Law prescribes rules, but it is also rule-based process: it
is an open examination of competing claims (eg between
privacy and free expression)
• Disputed and imperfect as that may be, it is way superior
to what the platforms are doing now, because cases are
heard in public and courts explain their reasoning

54. REGULATION DEPENDS
ON CONTEXT
• Regulation requires a strong, well-resourced institutions,
clear powers and laws and due process
• All that depends on an open society
• Totalitarian and authoritarian governments will use
regulation to suppress free speech without using classic
censorship
• Politicians in democratic countries will be tempted to
overdo control
• Regulators in Kenya, Malaysia and South Africa have
floated the idea of holding moderators legally liable for
‘false information’ in their groups

55. 13. FOOTNOTES AS
FRIENDS
• The internet lowers barriers to communication
• It also lowers our ability to tell truth from fiction (though
fakes were invented long before the web)
• Quality journalism depends not only on its sources but on
their visibility
• Not all sources (often the best) can be identified, but many
can
• The hyperlink is your friend
• Use it more often to link what you report to something that
helps to authenticate it

56. 14. NEUTRALITY AND
BALANCE CAN BE
GAMED
• Think carefully about balance, neutrality and
objectivity
• Extremists, flakes and nutcases have exploited
these rules. They can bluster in the name of
‘balance’ without being asked for evidence
• Putting an experienced doctor on TV to debate
with a sincere activist without research or
qualifications as if their views have equal weight
is to elevate process rules over helping people
to understand what is happening
• Now try applying that guidance to climate
change. Here’s a clue: it’s not straightforward

57. 15. TECHNOLOGY ISN’T
ALWAYS THE ANSWER
• Today’s issues have arisen in part because of
exaggerated belief in technocratic solutions
• AI is (quite) good at detecting porn, spam and
bots.
• Much less good at hate speech
• Innovations may increase social distrust,
weaken institutions and drive resentment of
elites
• But these are fundamentally problems of
relations between humans and have to be
addressed as such

58. 16. IDEAS ABOUT FREE
EXPRESSION NEED
UPDATING
• Sweeping generalisation: journalists place too much
reliance on the habits and formulas of the past
• Unreflective assertions of free expression rights
(such as the American 1st Amendment) have
contributed to the confusion over social media
• Should free expression rights cover amplification
such as recommendations, auto-suggestions and
sharing? (Courts have generally said they don’t).
• Choosing what to amplify or not is not curtailing free
speech

59. NAIL THIS ABOVE
YOUR DESK
• “…like a yogi or a jedi, your
challenge is to constantly
improve your awareness of the
pressures and adversaries you
face and evolve your strategy
for navigating them.” Danah
Boyd (@zephoria)

60. THE END
• Some of those pressures are old, some are new
• The shape of the news media and the public sphere are
choices
• Fight for the shape you want
• This was my helicopter trip round your generation’s
agenda
• Good luck!
• george.brock.1@city.ac.uk
• @georgeprof
• http://georgebrock.net